The Sunday Times - UK (2022-05-22)

The Sunday Times May 22, 2022 21

NEWS REVIEW

Lasers guiding

the tunnelling

machines are

accurate

to 5cm

Paddington

Reading

Tub e line

Bond Street

Tottenham Court Road

Farringdon

Tunnel

Liverpool Street

Whitechapel

Canary Wharf

Shenfield

TUNNEL VISION

Borers passed just

85cm above the

Northern Line tunnel

The tunnels

are 6.2m wide

compared to

the standard

3.5m for the Tube

Total length

of tunnels

26 miles

Total cost

£19bn

Hydraulic rams

push against newly

placed concrete

segments to move

the drill forward

Rotating

cutter

Rotating arm adds

concrete segments

to form a ring

Excavated earth

removed by

conveyor belt

The mighty machines that

burrowed under London to

create the Elizabeth Line

NORTHERN LINE

difficult section under

Tottenham Court Road,

where the borers passed a

mere 85cm above the

Northern Line tunnel and

35cm below the piles

supporting the escalator.

In the process, tunnellers

encountered the residue of

2,000 years of history. The

City financial district

corresponds approximately

with the boundaries of

Roman London.

Archaeologists located

3,500 skeletons in the

Bedlam burial pit from the

Great Plague of 1665-6, the

last outbreak of bubonic

plague in Britain. Tests

confirmed the identity of the

bacterium, which killed

nearly a quarter of London’s

population. The site is now

the location of a down

escalator for a ticket hall at

Liverpool Street station,

while the skeletons have been

reinterred in Essex.

On some outlying sections

of the lines, wild orchids had

to be replanted and new

homes found for eels, slow

worms and reptiles. As

Christian Wolmar, author of

Crossrail: The Whole Story,

notes: newts may be

endangered, but they turn up

with unfailing regularity on

railway schemes. It cost

£50 million to drain the area

between the Victoria and

Royal Albert Docks with a

cofferdam, before it had to be

filled again for an exhibition

at the nearby ExCeL centre.

The new underground

stations have been compared

to subterranean cathedrals,

yet this understates their eye-

popping scale. In order to

accommodate 200m-long

trains — almost twice the

length of existing Tube trains

— at up to 249m the platforms

are far longer even than the

mighty bulk of St Paul’s,

which measures a mere 158m

from the western facade to

the eastern end of the apse.

The design of each station

was finessed by a different

architectural practice to give

them slightly different

identities — for example,

Liverpool Street at the edge of

the City has a pin-striped

theme — but they do not

match the wildly extravagant

style of the last big

underground project, the

eastern extension of the

Jubilee Line which opened

just ahead of the millennium

celebration in 1999.

The Elizabeth Line

is expected to carry

130-170 million passengers a

year by 2026, adding 10 per

cent to the capacity of

London’s mass transit

system. Every element

is designed to remove

impediments to maximise

space for the tide of humanity

that washes in and out of the

capital. There are no toilets

nor refreshment bars on the

trains, and on each one there

are seats for only 450 out of a

potential 1,500 passengers.

The Elizabeth Line is

ready to welcome its first

fare-paying passengers but, it

seems, it does not want them

to feel too comfortable on

their journey.

3,500 skeletons, eel

relocation and digging

inches from disaster

The Elizabeth Line is opening at last — albeit more than three

years late. Nicholas Hellen salutes an amazing engineering feat

A

s costs soared and

deadlines whooshed

past, it seemed as if the

leaders of the Crossrail

project were

determined to transform the

£19 billion megaproject into a

national joke. The Queen, in

whose honour it was

renamed the Elizabeth Line,

evidently had other ideas. On

Tuesday she gave it the royal

seal of approval,

unexpectedly taking over

ceremonial duties from

Prince Edward, her youngest

son, at Paddington.

For Boris Johnson, the

prime minister, despite the

£4 billion cost overrun, and

the delay of three-and-a-half

years, the opening proved

that even in an age of

uncertainty, Britain still has

the chutzpah to accomplish

gargantuan feats of

engineering.

In the railway mania of the

mid-1840s, the vested interest

of aristocratic landowners,

such as the Grosvenor and

Bedford families, combined

with the lobbying power of

the City to halt the building of

mainline rail terminals such

as Paddington, King’s Cross

and Victoria at the periphery

of central London. Now, at

last, passengers will be able to

remain in their seats as they

traverse the capital for 73

miles from west to east.

When the Elizabeth Line

opens for passengers on May

24 with 12 trains an hour,

passengers will still have to

get out for transfers at

Paddington and Liverpool

Street, but by the autumn, the

line will be fully joined up,

though Bond Street station is

not yet finished.

To achieve this, Crossrail’s

engineers have displayed a

finesse akin to performing

keyhole surgery, remaining

almost invisible as they bored

26 miles of tunnels,

comparable in scale to the

Channel tunnel. The capital

continued largely

undisturbed and business

went on as normal. One of the

country’s most famous music

venues, the Astoria, was

demolished early on when

works began in 2009, but that

had been planned and it was

one of the relatively few

casualties of the project.

To achieve this, eight

mighty tunnelling machines,

each weighing 1,000 tonnes,

and likened to factories on

rails for their complexity,

gouged out six million tonnes

of earth and chewed through

the ground at a rate of 38m

(124ft) per day.

The crews dared not

trigger tremors which might

disturb the foundations of the

175,000 buildings perched

above ground, and, just to be

sure, whenever possible the

route followed roads to

minimise the risk of

triggering a landslip.

Nonetheless, 65,000

sensors had to be attached to

landmarks and office blocks

to detect vibrations within a

100m radius of the

excavations, with the threat

of compensation payments

for any damage. A total of

seven million tonnes of earth

Stations are

just like

subterranean

cathedrals —

and platforms

are longer

than St Paul’s

was extracted during the

project, of which three

million was used to raise

parts of a bird reserve on

Wallasea Island in Essex

by 1.5m.

Every load was weighed

carefully to avoid over-

excavation and the risk of a

collapse in the streets above,

and the space underground

was propped up with steel

ring segments or sprayed

concrete lining. There was a

single fatality underground, a

Slovakian named Rene

Tkacik, 44, who was crushed

in a tunnel in 2014, while four

deaths were also caused by

lorries above ground.

The comparison with an

operating theatre is not

far-fetched. Lasers guiding

the tunnelling machines are

accurate to 5cm, and this

precision came into its own

for the excavation of the most

As the Elizabeth Line

rolls into action, rail

infrastructure in the

north is being woefully

neglected, critics argue,

despite Boris Johnson’s

pledge to be “the prime

minister who does with

Northern Powerhouse

Rail what we did for

Crossrail in London”.

Proposals in 2018 for a

new line between

Liverpool and Leeds that

would cover about the

same 73-mile distance as

the Elizabeth Line have

since evaporated. Last

year the government

announced the scaling

back of the eastern leg of

HS2 that would have

connected Leeds to the

East Midlands in favour

of the cheaper option of

upgrading existing

railway infrastructure.

It also scrapped

proposals under the

£39billion Northern

Powerhouse Rail project

for a new 36-mile

east-west line from

Leeds to Manchester

via Bradford designed to

halve the journey time to

25 minutes.

... BUT IT’S
A GO-SLOW
IN THE NORTH

contrast to her boosterish predecessor —

evinces little interest in economic mat-

ters, preferring instead to talk about a

“wellbeing” economy previously consid-

ered the preserve of a Green Party hostile

to the concept of economic growth.

But then the SNP has always been con-

tent to contradict itself. Last week Stur-

geon and three aides racked up thou-

sands of kilograms of CO 2 emissions

flying to Washington for two days where

she gave a lecture about climate change.

She voiced support for abortion rights in

the US and warned Americans not to vote

in Donald Trump again, receiving the

blessing of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the

US House of Representatives. She also

posed happily for photographs with Rob-

ert Aderholt, the Alabama congressman

who co-chairs the Friends of Scotland

Caucus and wants to overturn Roe v

Wade, the ruling that enshrined the right

to an abortion in federal law in 1973.

Aderholt also backed a lawsuit contesting

President Joe Biden’s win over Trump.

Sturgeon joined the Campaign for

Nuclear Disarmament (CND) even before

she signed up to the SNP as a teenager but

her party now embraces Nato member-

ship even as her parliamentarians are

required to back CND’s demands for a

non-nuclear future. Nobody suggests that

an independent Scotland would be a

nuclear power, but Nato membership

means being part of a nuclear alliance.

Advocates of unilateral nuclear disarma-

ment fear the SNP is softening the road

towards accepting, even if only for a lim-

ited period, the UK’s nuclear submarines

remaining in Scotland even after inde-

pendence.

Domestically, Sturgeon’s record is

mixed. A flashy promise to create a pub-

licly owned energy company was quietly

dropped; so too was a headline-winning

pledge to create a Scottish equivalent of

the European Union’s Erasmus student-

exchange programme. Once, Sturgeon

asked to be judged on her government’s

progress in closing the educational

attainment gap between rich and poor

pupils. She set a target of “substantially”

eliminating the gap by 2026,

suggesting this be con-

sidered “a yardstick

by which the

Years of

promise

have

curdled

into

stasis

O

n Thursday Nicola Sturgeon

will once again overtake Alex

Salmond. She will have been in

office for seven years and 186

days, becoming Scotland’s

longest-serving first minister.

There will be no commemora-

tive — let alone congratulatory

— call between the two.

Salmond, disgraced by his trial and

acquittal on charges of sexual assault, is

one of his successor’s sternest critics. He

built a movement that took Scotland to

the brink of independence; Sturgeon’s

years of promise have slowly curdled into

stasis. The Scottish National Party (SNP)

dominates Scottish politics — and Stur-

geon’s supremacy is both unchallenged

and unchallengeable — but independ-

ence remains tantalisingly out of reach.

Sturgeon insists there will be a second

independence referendum next year but

few people can see that happening in the

absence of the British government’s con-

sent and overwhelming public support

for a plebiscite on that timetable. Stur-

geon’s one reason to celebrate is that she

has survived her former mentor’s efforts

to bring her down. “She’s had to become

emotionally stronger the past couple of

years,” says one Sturgeon ally. “The fall-

out with Alex Salmond hit her harder

than the pandemic. When Alex Salmond

called her a liar she wouldn’t leave the

house all weekend. But as she’s become

emotionally stronger she’s also become

more distant. The steel shutters have

come down.”

However, Sturgeon, even her admirers

say, is increasingly isolated and now lis-

tens to only a handful of people. SNP fig-

ures with significant responsibilities con-

fess to having little to no relationship with

the party leader and first minister. She is

said to have told confidantes they should

tell her when it is time for her to step

down but her coterie of advisers is chiefly

limited to John Swinney, the deputy first

minister, Colin McAllister, her chief of

staff, and her husband Peter. There are

few, if any, outside voices offering her

counsel. Cabinet meetings are short to

the point of abruptness and every inter-

nal SNP body that once had significant

power — from the national executive

committee to its annual national confer-

ence — has had its influence trimmed.

Although her government appears

tired, Sturgeon remains the SNP’s single

indispensable figure. There are few, if

any, alternatives. Kate Forbes, the

finance secretary whom Sturgeon con-

siders her most likely successor, is only

32, is about to have a baby, and is under-

stood to have no desire for the job. The

most likely alternative, should Stur-

geon decide she has had enough, is

Angus Robertson, the former

leader of the SNP’s Westminster

contingent and now cabinet

secretary for the constitution.

Insiders whisper, however,

that Sturgeon considers Rob-

ertson insufficiently active or

diligent.

This helps to explain Stur-

geon’s enthusiasm for a coali-

tion government with the Green

Party. SNP insiders argue that

Cop26, held in Glasgow, made a sig-

nificant impression on the first minister.

Climate change and the road to net zero

offered her a chance to reboot her minis-

try and provide a vision for the kind of

independent Scotland she aspires to

lead. Hence the manner in which the SNP

has begun cutting ties with the oil and gas

industry that, for decades, was expected

to lubricate and mitigate the initial astrin-

gent realities of an independent nation.

This month the Scottish government

took no part in the annual Offshore Tech-

nology Conference in Houston, Texas; a

sharp contrast to the days when, under

Salmond’s leadership, SNP ministers

would lead more than 60 companies to

the event. Sturgeon opposes new oil and

gas exploration in the North Sea and — in

After a record seven years as first minister, the SNP

leader is still skewering rivals, despite a string of

broken pledges. But with no obvious successor, she

has become increasingly isolated, writes Alex Massie

Sturgeon’s

lonely

supremacy

Michelle O’Neill, the Sinn Fein leader in

Northern Ireland, to her official resi-

dence, Bute House, on Friday — will

impinge on the SNP’s electoral prospects

any time soon. As the Scottish Election

Study report on last year’s Holyrood poll

concludes, “Even amid a once-in-a-cen-

tury global pandemic, in the immediate

aftermath of Brexit, under a government

plagued by substantive criticisms of its

policy, it was yet again Independence

Wot Won It for the incumbent SNP and,

more generally, the pro-independence

half of the electorate.”

Almost everyone in Scotland has a

view on independence and the 92 per

cent of voters in either the yes or no camp

cast their parliamentary vote accord-

ingly. Since the pro-UK vote is split three

ways, at a constituency level the SNP

enjoys a structural political advantage. It

is, however, not yet enough of an advan-

tage to deliver a new referendum.

The lack of progress towards inde-

pendence frustrates some internal crit-

ics. “The greatest disappointment” since

the heady days of 2014, says one, “has

been the decline in leadership, confi-

dence and verve”. Some SNP strategists

argue the party must accept there is no

imminent likelihood of winning inde-

pendence. It is time, instead, to move on

from “process” — the mechanics of get-

ting a referendum — and onto “policy” to

build support for independence.

In this view, the challenge is to make it

evident to all that independence, not dev-

olution, is — in the words of Donald

Dewar, the inaugural first minister — “the

settled will of the Scottish people”. Build-

ing that support means confronting the

post-Brexit complications apparent in

the independence case. A new policy

paper will try to settle the currency issue

— using the pound for an undetermined

but significant period of time — and argue

for a transformed economic agenda that

would increase Scottish prosperity. Fur-

ther work is still needed on matters such

as the timing and terms of proposed EU

membership and the detail of how the

Anglo-Scottish frontier would operate.

That little of this work has been

started, let alone completed, in the six

years since the Brexit vote re-energised

the independence cause is one standing

rebuke to Sturgeon’s leadership. She is

unchallenged and unchallengeable but

also oddly becalmed. She insists talk of

her successor is premature but if she is

not going anywhere, nor is Scotland.

people of Scotland can measure our

success”. Last week, Shirley-Anne

Somerville, the education secretary,

abandoned that promise, arguing

that closing the attainment gap

“has always been a long-term

project” and that it made no sense

to set an “arbitrary date” by which

time success should be achieved.

Progress so far is, the government

itself admits, limited.

No wonder that, according to the latest

edition of the Scottish Election Study, just

9 per cent of voters think Scottish educa-

tion has improved in recent years while

47 per cent believe its quality has

declined. Meanwhile, the debacle over

two new ferries for the Scottish islands —

five years overdue — continues. Costs

have spiralled from £100 million to at

least £250 million and ministers have not

explained why they insisted on awarding

the work to a Scottish shipyard even

though the government’s procurement

agency wished to reopen tenders. Nor is

that the only transport trouble: last week

newly nationalised ScotRail announced a

“temporary” timetable cutting hundreds

of services a day, partly as a result of a pay

dispute with its drivers.

There is no indication as to how long

this “temporary” state of affairs will last.

Nor, though, is there any reason to sup-

pose any of these domestic difficulties —

or even Sturgeon’s decision to welcome

Sturgeon can

give Boris

Johnson, Ruth

Davidson and

Alex Salmond

a kicking, but a

new vote on

independence

may be out of

her reach

ILLUSTRATION: TONY BELL